“You’re. Fucking. Fired!” Zach yelled. “That’s what you are.”
Josh put a hand against Zach’s chest, tossed Marshall’s briefcase onto the Lexus’s hood, and held up a file folder. “You’re also not the guy with the contract.”
Josh slapped the file into Zach’s hand, gripped his arm, and led him deeper into the parking lot where Josh’s car waited.
Once they were in the car and on the road, Zach dropped his head back against the seat and covered his eyes with his hand. “I’m so fucked.”
“No, man,” Josh said, “you’ve been getting fucked. Now, you’re a survivor. And survivors become warriors.”
After the last few days, Zach was pretty damned sure he didn’t have what it took to be a warrior. Only, the fight wasn’t over. In fact, he was sure the battle had just begun.
10
Tessa sipped her third glass of wine with her left hand and picked a card from the pile at the center of the Candy Land board game and turned it over.
“Two lellows,” Sophia said and picked up Tessa’s blue gingerbread man, counting, “One, two.”
“Well done,” Tessa said. “Your turn.”
Sophia picked a card, looked at the picture, and gasped. “Mommy, it’s the ice-cream cone!”
“Oh my gosh,” she said with melodramatic excitement for Sophia’s benefit. “You’re so lucky.”
Sophia moved her red gingerbread man to the image of an ice-cream cone on the ribboned path of multicolored squares.
“Sometimes I hope she never learns the y sound,” Tessa confessed to Abby, who sat on the couch flipping through a magazine.
“Right? Lellow. It’s so bloody adorable.”
Tessa drew her card and let Sophia move her marker. The first two glasses of wine had her relaxed and slightly loopy. She wasn’t sure how long it would take to master the fine motor skills required to get the gingerbread man from square to square. But she didn’t regret the wine. She would be pulling her eyelashes out one by one if she didn’t lean on some vice while she waited to hear back from Zach.
While Sophia was distracted with her turn, Tessa tapped the face of her phone to turn on the screen.
“Anything?” Abby asked.
“No.”
Abby sighed. Tessa wanted to rail with every passing minute when no communication came from Zach. “I’ll go over to his hotel again later.” After Miss Sophia had fallen asleep. “Maybe I’ll step out of the view of the peephole this time.”
“Or,” Abby said with a devilish grin, “I could pull the fire alarm, wait outside his door, and trip him on the way out.”
Tessa laughed. “I love your twisted mind.”
“One of my many charms.” She shut the magazine, sighed, and looked at their board game. “Hurry up and beat your mum, love. It’s bath time.”
Sophia pulled another card, looked at the board, looked at the card again… She gasped. “I won! I won!” And she triumphantly moved her gingerbread man the two requisite spaces across the finish line. Then bounced on her knees and clapped. “I won, Mommy.”
“Fair and square,” Tessa told her, ruffling her hair. “After bath, we’ll start reading one of your new Little Bear books.”
“A Kiss for Litter Bear,” she said definitively as she tried to straighten the cards in her little hands to put them away.
When the board game was packed into its travel box, Abby took Sophia into the bathroom and Tessa checked her phone again. She knew there wouldn’t be a message, but it still frustrated her. In fact, she was starting to get pissed off. Tessa was endlessly patient. She was compassionate. A gold-star mediator. But even she was about ready to implode after waiting for three days to hear from Zach.
She opened her laptop and glanced at the time. It was 8:00 p.m. She’d try his hotel room at ten. And at midnight. And at two. Hell, she was about ready to bring a blanket and pillow and sleep across the threshold. If that didn’t work, she might have to make a scene at the set. That might just piss him off enough to deal with this.
Her email was filled with updates on the Veterans Health bill from Gordon. She browsed them, relieved to hear the veterans lobbyists had found common ground with the
pharmaceutical lobbyists. They were closing in on the deadline set to introduce the bill, and she knew too well how many lobbyists would wait until the week before to raise hell over something missing in the language.